In the article they say “functional training” has 6 components. Sounds like we are on the right track.

1. Train movements, such as pushing, pulling, planking, stepping, and squatting, rather than muscles.2. Train to your side and three-quarter view, not just to the space in front of you.3. Train on two feet.4. Learn to control your body weight in a full range of motion, with good form, before adding loads. (This alone could take several months.)5. Train speed.6. Train the reduction of force—the ability to land and catch and absorb force and decelerate—as often as you train the production of force.

Be As Fit As A Soldier

The army is redefining fitness to match the real world soldiers fight in. Shouldn’t you do the same, maggot?

By Paul John Scott, Photographs by Greg Broom

ON A WARM AFTERNOON AT THE U.S. ARMY physical readiness division, or PRD, in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, Sergeant First Class Steven Lee leads 50 U.S. Army Reserve drill sergeants through an hour of tough new exercises. He never hollers once. Welcome to the army’s new approach to fitness. It’s about time.

In the first drill, soldiers traverse 25 yards of Carolina scrub grass in a hip-blasting lunge walk, their backs upright and butts hovering at an altitude just above chair level. Most of them lunge-walk like the Bolshoi troupe, but a few have trouble getting their butts very low or their backs very straight—at least since no actual snipers are nearby.

In the next exercise each man tucks his head, rolls over a shoulder, and pops back up on his feet. A shoulder roll trains body awareness and coordination, yes, but it also moves a man safely out of a stumble and back into a defensive position—which can make the difference between life and death. Bad news: A few of the soldiers struggle to roll forward instead of sideways, but that they’re even trying to do this can be considered progress. After one last drill—lifting and carrying a fallen comrade in six basic movements—the group takes a pair of laps around a 10-part whole-body strength circuit, making 1-minute stops for pullups, hanging leg tucks, kettlebell squats, stepups, straight-leg deadlifts, chest presses, overhead push presses, rows, forward lunges, and twists.

With its focus on gymnastic movements, whole-body exercises, and Russian strongman hardware, this training session looks like strength camp for a Division I sports program. Evidently your average grunt has come a long way from “drop and give me 50.” This is the rollout of Training Circular 3-22.20, Army Physical Readiness Training, the uninspiring title of an awesome 434-page manual and Web media package a decade in the making.TC 3-22.20 is revamping what it means to be fit enough to serve in the largest branch of the U.S. military.

Unlike the army’s previous fitness test—a desultory couple of minutes’ worth of pushups and situps, plus a 2-mile run—the new test measures the physical qualities you can’t cram for on the cheap. It has a long-jump component, for instance, and its combat version is an agility circuit that soldiers run in uniform while carrying their weapons. “If you’re following the new training program, the test will be the easiest day you ever had,” says Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling, U.S. Army Europe commander, who has worked on the physical preparation of our troops. “We hope these tests will ensure that soldiers know that physical readiness is a 24-7/365 requirement. Because you can’t train for them, there’s going to be more emphasis on maintaining and improving conditioning at all times.”

TC 3-22.20 has been in place since August 2010, and the PRD has tried out the tests for a new exam and collected data on thousands of soldiers in order to develop scoring and standards for it. The army will next decide on revisions (if any) and timelines. But the manual’s impact will be nothing less than profound. Following the lead of military-readiness experts, the army is abandoning a corporate-health fitness model and replacing it with one focused on performance. And here’s the good part: As a taxpayer in the United States, TC 3-22.20 is yours for the taking. Given the brainpower behind it, you would be smart to enlist.

IN THE PAST, THE ARMY TRAINED ITS SOLDIERS as if they were a bunch of office workers hoping to notch points in some corporate wellness program. It was all about aerobics and muscle endurance. Check the box, move on to the next exercise. The new manual focuses on more meaningful “soldier athlete” skills—badass qualities like quickness, body control, mobility, and total muscular-skeletal readiness for the work of battle. “All kinds of rumors have been circulating about what this is and what it isn’t,” Hertling says. “People say it’s like yoga, it’s Pilates, it’s CrossFit. Frankly it is all of those things. It’s functional fitness. It’s preparing the body to take on challenges in different ways.”

In other words, take heed Bally’s, because TC 3-22.20 marks a turning point in the evolution of exercise. By doing away with the traditional value system of old-school gyms, this updated army method officially makes movement-based training the new mainstream, the American way of exercise. The largest branch of the United States military didn’t go about this change in a haphazard manner: It abandoned its focus on situps and jogging only after a painstaking review of its history of physical readiness preparation. By studying the records of past generations of army recruits, some of whom emerged from basic training ready for battle and some who did not, the PRD discovered a consistent pattern of superior soldiers who were trained following the hard-won lessons of war.

In 1946, for example, basic training included repeated bouts of squat jumps. Fitness geeks now think of a squat jump as a multijoint, multi-planar, ground-based exercise, but in the years after World War II, the army knew that the squat jump had a more utilitarian purpose: It gets your ass in and out of a foxhole. In addition, soldiers in the 1940s had to knock out regular sets of shuttle runs, because they knew that survival under incoming shells meant being able to sprint 20 feet to grab your rifle and dive for cover. All without blowing out your back or ACL.

The more the army researchers studied the past, the more they became enamored with a walrus-mustached patriarch of military conditioning: Lt. Col. Herman J. Koehler, a turn-of-the-century fitness pioneer. Under Koehler, the U.S. Military Academy achieved spectacular standards of physical readiness in the years preceding World War I, all by using gymnastics-based exercises and simple tools like ropes, ladders, vaulting horses, and parallel bars. The PRD discovered that posture, an old-school progression, and precision of training produced soldiers who could kick ass on the standard pushup, situp, and running test, and who were more ready to face the current challenges they might come up against. Three out of four Koehler-style trainees at Fort Benning scored 300 or higher on a recent army physical fitness test—well above the passing score of 180.

Having rediscovered and then tested lessons from its past, the army came to a sobering conclusion. Movement-based training is neither merely trendy nor in any way soft. It is actually the old army way of doing things. “As someone once told me,” says Hertling, “if you want a new idea, read an old book.” He points out that in peacetime the army often succumbs to the influence of fitness mavens. But following the lessons of conflict, it returns to building soldiers who move well. “There are times in our history when we have fallen back on civilian fitness experts as opposed to military-readiness experts,” he says. “There’s a key difference there. [Aerobics guru] Kenneth Cooper had a great program in the 1960s. But it’s not one we should have picked up as our primary means of preparing forces for combat.”

Just the mention of training for Afghanistan by taking a lazy 5-mile jog makes SFC Lee shake his head. “When you’re over there and getting shot at, you’re not doing long-distance running,” he says with a laugh. “You’re going as fast as you can to the next big object [for protection]. You have to have a lot of anaerobic energy to move very fast over and over again.”

But Afghanistan isn’t the only challenge the army is facing. It’s confronting problems in our own zip codes too. Today’s recruits are the products of a society that has replaced milk with soda, traditional physical education with minivan rides to soccer practice, and unchaperoned afternoons spent tree climbing with Wii. “It’s an area where we have missed the boat,” Hertling says. “As we have eliminated physical education from schools and replaced PE grades with sports grades, we are becoming sport-specific to the detriment of overall health.” The result? The army sees more soldiers reporting to the military with great throwing skills but brittle bones, a paucity of experience in taking a pounding, and an inability to execute even basic body movements. And the army is increasingly drawing from a pool of potential recruits who are good at PlayStation but uncoordinated and prone to injury in the real world.

If you want to measure the athletic deterioration of a generation, take a look at the army’s 1-1-1 Physical Fitness Assessment. It asks new male recruits to complete at least 13 pushups in 1 minute, then at least 17 situps in 1 minute, and finally a mile run in 8 1/2 minutes or less. So it’s not exactly the Ironman, which is why only 4 percent of new male soldiers at an army training center failed the thing in 2000. By 2006, however, 22 percent of new male soldiers couldn’t pass the 1-1-1.

“We have so many people coming into the army who have a little or no fitness background,” says Stephen Van Camp, deputy director of the physical readiness division. “You’re bringing people in who typically have a low level of activity, and then you march them all day and exercise them all day, and it’s more than some can handle, given their nutritional backgrounds,” says Frank Palkoska the PRD’s director.

The other problem is that the young men and women who are fit usually have a very narrow experience of exercise, one centered around a particular sport, at best. “If I’m a collegiate runner, I am running linearly, in a straight line,” says Palkoska. “If I’m a soldier, I’m running at angles so I don’t get shot, going as fast as I can, and typically carrying 70 to 90 pounds of gear while I’m doing it. We have to teach soldiers how to start, stop, get up, get down, change direction, and move laterally, because that’s everything we do on the battlefield.”

“That is a whole different set of circumstances we have to prepare people for, people who may have no foundational functional capability,” says Van Camp.

FUNCTIONAL TRAINING HAS A SHORT LIST: Its six commandments (anybody have another four handy?) have been repeated before and will be repeated again and again as physical culture moves the way of the army.

1. Train movements, such as pushing, pulling, planking, stepping, and squatting, rather than muscles.

2. Train to your side and three-quarter view, not just to the space in front of you.

3. Train on two feet.

4. Learn to control your body weight in a full range of motion, with good form, before adding loads. (This alone could take several months.)

5. Train speed.

6. Train the reduction of force—the ability to land and catch and absorb force and decelerate—as often as you train the production of force.

One of the first casualties in the new regimen was the situp. Flexing the abs does have a purpose—it can help get you over a wall—but you need to do it while you’re in the air. At the PRD, trainers have switched their focus from the noxious situp to battle-ready drills, such as a seemingly fun-injected manifestation that looks a lot like something you’d do back when you would climb trees after school. It’s called the heel hook, and drill sergeants are busy knocking out the drill on the PRD lawn. They hang with their shoulders perpendicular to a chinup bar and one hand gripping it in front of the other. Then they pull their chest upward and finish by hoisting their ankles over the bar and crossing them. Try this at the gym and you’ll be greeted with stares of envy. Hey, thinks the guy doing preacher curls, are you sure that’s allowed?

This kind of leg work is more than just a great way to exercise your trunk (abdominals and hip flexors) without excessively loading your spine. It is what soldiers actually need to do when they climb. “If you look at the ability to negotiate any high obstacle, you have to be able to get your legs up to your head,” says Palkoska. Here he touches on something the army used to have a little of a long time ago and has since rediscovered: common sense. The right kinds of abs—those developed from bracing and hanging—are more than just functional; they can keep you from getting hit by the enemy. “If I’m trying to climb over a fence or a high wall in a combat situation,” he says, “and if I just muscle myself up to the top of that wall, I create a really tall target. I want to maintain a low profile and kind of just ease over it. A leg tuck develops the trunk strength needed to negotiate those types of obstacles.”

Think of it like this. A situp is an exercise. A leg tuck is a shimmy. Guess which one makes you into a better soldier? If it isn’t practical in the field, it’s a waste of time in the gym. “We’ve seen huge improvements in physical conditioning,” says Lt. Gen. Hertling. “Less failures on the old test. Fewer injuries. And more emphasis on training smarter as opposed to training more. When you try the new manual, you say, ‘this is a smoker of a workout.’ And it’s addressing deficiencies we have. It’s one thing to be fit and have anaerobic and muscular endurance. It’s another thing to be ready for what you’re about to be asked to do.”